In 2000 a leading legal historian believed it was ‘hardly possible’ to ‘re-create the atmosphere and physical surroundings’ where eighteenth-century barristers worked in the Royal Courts at Westminster. This project has effectively attempted to do just that by providing a visual and audio recreation of King’s Bench for modern viewers. No written source or historical image can provide a clear window through which we can ‘see’ the past, and all provide only a particular perspective of an event, person or place at a specific moment in time. Nevertheless, this composite digital recreation of the court based on multiple sources created between 1790 and 1810, comes close to proving the concept of recreating judicial spaces and the experience of barristers who worked in them at that time is possible. Even in that relatively short period of time minor changes, as suggested above, would have occurred, but it looked very similar until it was dismantled permanently in 1820.

The Royal Holloway team worked with Arcade, a digital company specialising in three-dimensional immersive technology, to recreate a digital version of the late C18th and early C19th century courtroom within Westminster Hall. The founders, Simon Hobbs and Jon Megitt had originally studied architecture and they had recently worked with Matthew Smith to produce an interactive digital version of Westminster Hall itself. The court of King’s Bench provided a different challenge because the physical space no longer exists, so they relied on the historical surveys, plans and prints illustrated above. The design went through 4 iterations to reach the ‘proof of concept’ version you can see on this website, which provides two different views and a 360-degree perspective of the court, an architectural estimation of how the natural light would have fallen on the court, plus fixtures to provide a more immersive experience. As with most projects, more time and a larger budget could result in an even more detailed representation of King’s Bench, but this technology and the use of similar research methods could enable historians to rebuild and analyse many different judicial spaces.

Dr Nicola Phillips